A decent email-bag (well, for a weekend) on my enthusiastic post about Peter Beinart’s column titled “The Nativist Temptation” in the October 28 New York Post.

[Note A: The column is still, very mysteriously to me, unavailable on the web. Google searches using “beinart nativist” come up with nada. Obviously something underhand going on here. Perhaps the great Bushite Mexicanization-of-America conspiracy has a wider reach than I heretofore suspected. Note to self: Start looking under car before turning ignition.]

[Note B: Beinart’s title tells you the angle from which he is approaching this issue. If wanting your country’s population to go on looking (speaking, etc.) pretty much the way it currently does, is nativist, then I don’t see anything wrong with nativism. It’s an interesting piece, none the less.]

Jpod’s posting, in a different context, of Andrew Ferguson’s article on James Webb is pertinent. A couple of readers sent me links to Ferguson’s piece. Plainly, Webb is a Lou Dobbs Democrat. (The immigration punch line is towards the end of Ferguson’s piece.)

I got barked at by Larry Auster , & there are some follow-up points on Larry’s site. Larry will never forgive me for having said, several years ago, that his website (to which I was, am, and shall continue to be, a frequent and appreciative visitor) is a humor-free zone. Burn my house, steal my car, drink my liquor from that ol’ fruit jar, but never, NEVER accuse a man of having no sense of humor.

In response to that reader of Larry’s who thinks I am looking to defect to the Dems, all I can say is: No way. I am a registered Republican & have no plan to change that. My recent posts about punishing Congressional Republicans have all been couched in terms of (as English schoolmasters used to say while taking a few warm-up practice strokes with the tawse) “this will hurt me more than it hurts you”–in hopes that we might IMPROVE Congressional Republicanism by teaching them a painful lesson. If economists can talk about “creative destruction,” why can’t I?

But on the main point, I still think Beinart is on to something: “For many blue-collar Americans today, Mexican immigration–whether legal or not–is not just linked to broader anxieties about globalization; it has become the prime symbol of those anxieties. In the coming years, unless Democrats take a hard line on immigration, their hard line on trade is unlikely to do them much electoral good.”